Epicor ERP - Epicor ICE Business Architecture |
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Nothing stays still for long in our global economy. Business today is fast-paced, highly competitive, and more demanding than ever before. In order to remain competitive, enterprises must be prepared to adapt business processes quickly to reflect ever-changing market trends and demands. The business technologies of tomorrow must be intuitive, compliant and super productive. In response to this demand, Epicor has created a new concept in software: an agile, next-generation business architecture. Epicor recognized that business software requirements were changing as early as 2002 when we introduced our first business software built from the ground up using 100% service-oriented architecture (SOA) and based on Microsoft .NET technologies. Service-Oriented Architecture for Business Success Our years of experience with SOA and our many successful SOA offerings have resulted in a process that allows us to separate technology framework from business application in order to promote lean and efficient software development that in turn provides the agility, scalability, and extensibility needed by our customers. We call this Epicor Internet Component Environment (ICE) Business Architecture. We also recognized that SOA alone was not enough to allow us to offer the type of business software that would help our customers achieve their goals and stay ahead of the competition. Epicor ICE redefines business architecture by exploiting both the social and technical aspects of Web 2.0 technologies and fusing them with modern SOA to deliver a solution that is at once designed for people, built for business, yet ready for change. Epicor True SOA™ A service-oriented approach ensures an abstraction of complexities in terms of how business systems are built and operated. In a service-oriented architecture, business logic, that represents software processes is broken down into a series of loosely coupled granular “business services” which are then made available and discoverable on a network via Web services. Each service provides functionality that can be adapted to the needs of the enterprise while hiding the underlying implementation details. By exposing business processes, service-oriented architecture provides the ability to streamline those same processes, which in turn promotes agile change management. In a service-oriented architecture, because business processes are broken down into smaller functions that can be easily accessed and manipulated, it becomes that much easier to have your business system represent your business rules. Epicor True SOA™ goes a step further, by considering all business logic, including the client, as “business services.” It is because of Epicor True SOA™ that all Epicor next-generation enterprise applications can be manipulated using Epicor business process management (BPM) and Epicor Service Connect. However, Epicor True SOA™ also features the Epicor Everywhere™ Framework, a unique technology that stores all client business logic as XML metadata. This permits Epicor applications to run as smart clients or web clients or on mobile devices, all from the same source code. Epicor ICE together with Epicor productivity tools like Epicor Portal, Epicor Service Connect, and Epicor Information Worker, and Epicor next-generation enterprise applications provide a truly collaborative and dynamic business experience, offering new levels of flexibility, usability and scalability. Epicor ICE helps businesses reduce costs, increase hardware utilization, and optimize infrastructure and server availability. With the advent of Epicor ICE Business Architecture, today’s businesses now have a highly sophisticated standards-based platform for low-cost integration and high-end performance that offers unprecedented user productivity and a rapid return on investment (ROI). Epicor ICE Business Architecture: The foundation for the next- generation of enterprise application:
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